Video: Pasteur’s Lab for Urgent Response to Biological Threats

“We’re specialists of nothing, but accountable for everything.”

When epidemic strikes, the Laboratory for Urgent Response to Biological Threats (CIBU) at the Institut Pasteur goes into overdrive, working round the clock to identify the infectious agent at the start of the phenomenon. From SARS to H1N1 to the new coronavirus, in this video, CIBU’s director Jean-Claude Manuguerra explains how the team functions to fulfill its public health mission when faced with an unidentified agent causing disease.

When epidemic strikes, the Laboratory for Urgent Response to Biological Threats (CIBU) at the Institut Pasteur goes into overdrive, working round the clock to identify the infectious agent at the start of the phenomenon. From SARS to H1N1 to the new coronavirus, in this video, CIBU’s director Jean-Claude Manuguerra explains how the team functions to fulfill its public health mission when faced with an unidentified agent causing disease.

Jean-Claude Manuguerra, Director of CIBU, at the Institut Pasteur

Created in 2002 following the anthrax scares in the US the previous fall, the Laboratory for Urgent Response to Biological Threats (CIBU, Cellule d’Intervention Biologique d’Urgence) of the Institut Pasteur in Paris has the job of identifying biological threats when such a problem first appears. This could be a natural epidemic, microbiological accident or bioterrorist attack. “For the time being,” explains CIBU’s director, Jean-Claude Manuguerra, “we’ve only really worked because of Nature.”

H1N1, SARS, H5N1: When the situation turns hot, CIBU’s team of scientists and technicians works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In this video, Dr. Manuguerra reveals how the lab operates to identify infectious agents in samples that may come from anywhere in the world; could be viral or bacterial; and might be known, rare or, so far, unknown...

Equipped with tools like a DNA chip representing 900 species of virus, and in collaboration with specialized labs, CIBU is able to identify biological threats ever faster, and stands at the ready for two agents currently being watched, H7N9 and coronavirus.